


Remembrance of a Demon's Eyes

by oninofukuchou (OrderOfRevan)



Series: The Demon's Eyes [1]
Category: Hakuouki
Genre: F/M, Fan Characters, Novelization, Queerplatonic Toshiami, Tags to be added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21887578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrderOfRevan/pseuds/oninofukuchou
Summary: Hamamura Mikoto had come to Kyoto from distant Edo to start anew and leave her past behind her.No more would she be the daughter of a sandal-maker, betrothed for the sake of her father's business. She would pursue what she wanted...And what she wanted was contained in the eyes of a tough-talking, sword-waving, son of a farmer from the same countryside that had given birth to her ancestors.
Relationships: Hijikata Toshizou/Original Character
Series: The Demon's Eyes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576669
Kudos: 12





	Remembrance of a Demon's Eyes

Saito Hajime’s voice drifted from outside of the door, announcing himself with unusually heavy air. 

Typically, his presence was like the first snow of the winter, destined to melt away with the kind of cold impermanence that lingered as a chill on your skin long after you’d returned to the safety of your home. Right now, the timbre of his voice roused her from her hearthside dosing with its severity, driving her to her feet to pull open the door with a noisy clatter. 

The cold greeted her, the light from dim embers of the once whispering flames shuddering their last breath, the moon drawing the blue out from the world around them as it drowned the last warmth she felt. A shiver traveled down her spine, and she found herself caught by the directness of Saito’s gaze, his lips pressed into a stern line as he searched her face for … something. 

With him, she could never be sure what. 

“The vice-commander requires your presence,” he said, stepping aside for her. 

Mikoto didn’t ask any more, partly because she suspected he wouldn’t tell her if she did ask. 

Had it been something to do with rounds, something more trivial, he would dutifully keep all channels of communication open… But tonight was the last night of the old year and the first night of the new, and special in the worst way she could possibly imagine. 

Instead, she turned back around to pull her blades from their resting place, slipping them into place at her side without any fanfare. No man of the Shinsengumi would be caught dead without his weapons at his hip, especially when every wall of Yagi house hummed with anticipation that set the human senses alight. 

“Where is he?” she asked, stroking the hilt of her wakizashi for comfort, slipping back into her sandals as Saito slid her door shut behind them. 

“He has already retired to his room,” Saito said, pausing for a moment to look at her, blue eyes flickering in the moonlight like an icy flame. “I suggest moving quickly.”

She said nothing else to him, setting off for her desitionation in the kind of lonely silence that allowed her mind to drift to a million worst case scenarios. Had one of the Corpsmen skulking through the streets killed a civilian? Would there be another cover up, just like there had been with the fire and Serizawa’s inevitable demise? 

The questions hung over her like a cloud passing over the moon, her anxiety mounting to a fever pitch as it entwined with something else … A small spark of inspiration as it peeked from the depths of her mind. She clung to it, letting it make the pads of her fingers itch in anticipation until the sensation drowned out everything else.

Mikoto stopped outside of the familiar door, finding it difficult to announce herself.

Inside she could hear the sound of a brush scratching frantically across the surface of paper before someone shifted where they were sitting. She watched the shadow of a man hunched over a desk straighten and stretch before a familiar voice grunted in a low, irritable tone. 

“You gonna sit out there all night, Hamamura?” 

Swallowing her hesitance, she slipped out of her sandals as she stepped onto the veranda and slowly opened his door. Inside, the room was lit with warm lantern light that spilled across the tatami covered floor and cast his face in sinister shadow. 

The door clicked shut behind her and she sat facing him, bowing her head in formal greeting before she carefully arranged her swords on the floor in front of her. Sitting back up, she found he was already staring at her in his unnervingly calm way that never reached his eyes, reflecting the heat of the lanterns tenfold. 

“Drop the formality,” he said, reaching for a small satchel she hadn’t noticed sitting at his side; the kind used for traveling long distances. “I’m not going to send you out on a patrol, I just want your opinion on something.” 

He paused, tossing the bundle to her with a flick of his wrist as he adjusted his own posture, sitting with his elbow propped up on his knee. The sharp frown on his features vanished partially in shadow as he turned his head, staring at the papers on his desk without really seeing them, his mind elsewhere on this cold Kyoto night. 

As usual he didn’t bother to elaborate, likely wanting her unfiltered opinion about this stranger’s traveling bundle. He’d done this to her before, showing her pieces of correspondence between varying parties to see if her interpretation lined up with his … Or if she noticed something he didn’t, which may have been the case in the past, but… 

But in the year she’d known him, that had changed. 

He was far more involved in the politics of the day than she could ever hope to be.

Pushing the thoughts away to focus on her immediate task, Mikoto opened the bundle gingerly and brushed her fingers against the items inside. There wasn’t much -- A pouch of coins, a few letters, an old and worn looking charm of some sort, and an antique hair pin. For certain, it didn’t look to belong to a man, reminding her of the sorts of things her mother would pack when going to stay with one of her sisters for a few weeks while she left their home to Mikoto. 

Reaching out, she carefully placed the sentimental items aside to look at the letters. Small, masculine handwriting, the same on both letters, though the contents were different. One was a letter from a father to his daughter, signed as “Papa”, describing his work as a doctor in Kyoto... And generally wishing his daughter good health and expressing melancholy over being apart from her for so long. The other appeared to be a set of instructions, or a letter of introduction of some sort, to hand off to someone named “Matsumoto”, apparently a practitioner of Western Medicine. 

“It belongs to an unmarried woman,” she said after a moment. “If she had a husband, her father wouldn’t be expressing quite so much worry over her being alone. I also doubt she would need to reach out to a perfect stranger if something were to happen to him, should she have any kind of relatives to take care of her, so I suspect she has no mother.” 

She turned towards the charm to get a better look at it, examining the small pouch, suspecting that it was rather new from how bright it was. The design was somewhat familiar to her, even though she hadn’t been to whatever shrine this came from, and she frowned, looking up to meet the vice-commander’s eyes.

“I think she went on a long journey. Obviously, there’s the satchel, but this is an amulet of protection of some sort. She wouldn’t have this if someone didn’t think it was necessary she keep it on her person.” Mikoto paused and worried her bottom lip between his teeth, watching his face grow darker with each word that she spoke, as if they visibly weighed him down. “Hijikata, what is this about?” 

“There was an incident,” he said, his violet eyes narrowed into twin slits, as dangerous as the edge of a blade.“The corpsman managed to get their hands on some ronin.”

Mikoto could imagine all too easily the scene they’d left behind, nothing but bloody pulp where chests and stomachs had once been, the sort of mutilation that left men barely recognizable as human at all. She’d seen it only once before and it had churned her stomach to the point where she hadn’t been sure she’d ever be able to eat again, but she’d gotten over it. 

She hadn’t had any choice in the matter. 

“I doubt this girl is in the habit of keeping company with ronin,” Mikoto said with a wry smile, reaching up to massage her temples, the implications already dripping from the context of their conversation like blood from the tip of a blade. “Is she here now?” 

“We’ve locked her in one of the spare rooms,” Hijikata responded coolly. “We’ll need to interrogate her before we make a decision, but I wanted your feedback.” 

He reached out, taking the intricate pin into his hand to stare at it, his expression suddenly conflicted. She’d seen that face before, the sort of face he’d made more often before that rainy night not too long ago, when the heavens had washed away all evidence of Serizawa Kamo. 

Shifting, Mikoto moved closer to Hijikata to take a better look at it the pin; a pretty pin for a pretty girl, metal wrought in the shape of a flower. It was such an innocent thing, like something her little sisters would have worn when they were younger, an adornment for a young lady. 

Someone Hijikata would never want to kill.

Someone he would kill if he had to. 

“She was dressed like a boy,” he said, then snorted. “Like that would fool anyone with a pair of eyes. Don’t know the full extent of what she saw, but I wanted a second opinion on the stuff she was carrying.” 

Hijikata smiled, but it was all teeth and didn’t reach his eyes, like a hollow snarl, “figured you might be able to tell me more about what she might have been thinking, coming all the way out here by herself.” 

“I have a guess,” Mikoto said, “but it’s not too hard to piece together from the context of the letters.” 

“It’s not,” he agreed, “but there are just some things we’re not gonna know about how a girl thinks. Your bit about her having people who care about her was pretty good, and the things about this hair pin.” As he spoke the words, he set it back down in front of him. “It tells me she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, probably too stupid to get to an Inn before dark.” 

Mikoto felt herself smile at his description of the young woman, but his usual rough speech did little to comfort her from the thought that nagged her. 

Unable to tear her eyes from the pin, she spoke without meeting his eyes, “are you going to kill her?” 

She heard and felt him shift more than saw it, his body heat to her immediate right accompanied by a deep and weary sigh. The lantern light seemed that much brighter without the shape of his broad shoulders to cast her in perpetual shadow, the glow dancing off the metal surface of the pin cheerfully. 

It was a hollow comfort. 

Mikoto could feel him deliberating over his next words as if he knew she wouldn’t want to hear them. “You know about the experiments. I’ll need you to be there.” 

Mikoto finally raised her head, finding him looking back at her with the intensity she’d grown used to, an order chiseled into the press of his lips and the divot in his brow. It was that very same thing that had first drawn her to him in that quaint little tea shop, when he’d spoken to the unlawful ronin as if he held the authority of the Shogun himself, but without any pretension. 

It was the same unspoken voice with which he now commanded her, the effortless air of leadership that would have helped him claw his way from the stone, dirt, and clay that had formed him no matter the era he’d been born into. That look sparked inspiration deep inside of her belly and awakened within her something tangled and primal, an instinct that drove her to follow him all the way to the ends of the earth if only to commit just the memory of him to paper. 

Mikoto nodded her head, balling her fists on her lap before bowing to him again, sensing that their conversation had drawn to a close. 

“I will go wherever you lead, vice-commander,” she said in an unwavering voice, caught in the way light and shadow played across his face for only a moment and seeing there the demon whose mantle he had taken. 

* * *

Every man who had trained at the Shieikan sat in the room, looking as severe and tired as they had when Kodo Yukimura had disappeared into the midnight mist. A hush prevailed as it had since early that morning when they had eaten breakfast in silence, the day’s task looming before them. 

All day long the Captains came in and out of that room, where Kondou, Hijikata, and Sanan had been holed since after they’d finished eating. She suspected each man would report on what he had been doing the night before to get a complete picture of the events as they’d transpired in real time … Though really, only Hijikata, Saito, and Souji had anything to do with their witness.

This was just like them, really. 

They were always thorough and always had been, even in the earliest days of her involvement with them. Even as she spent most of her day doing the duties of a rank and file member of their ronin group, she caught snatches of conversation between them and observed them buzzing about like a hive of wasps. 

By the time they’d sent someone to fetch her, she’d already finished with her private training and was using the well to clean the sweat from the back of her neck. Lunch had long passed, and she had a feeling it would be a late supper as she was ushered by Saito into the meeting room. 

And so she settled into position, sitting on the left side of the room close to the door while looking toward Commander Kondou or his vice-commanders to break the silence. 

“Now that we’ve all gathered here, I think we should start with a description of the situation in brief,” Kondou said, his amber eyes straying to Hijikata. “Toshi?” 

“Last night, some of the men residing in Maekawa house escaped into the city and went out on a killing spree,” Hijikata reported. “The three of us encountered them after they had mutilated a group of rogue ronin. We managed to take them out, but ...”

He closed his eyes and huffed, his expression severe. 

“There was a witness.”

No one reacted with surprise, but Mikoto had expected this. It wasn’t like Hijikata to keep everything from the men he trusted the most to carry out his orders; nonetheless, the air was thick with static, as it often was on the eve before a storm. 

She could practically taste the promise of it on her tongue. 

“What kind of witness?” Nagakura asked, dark, heavy brows drawn low over his blue eyes. “That could mean a lot of different kinds of people, Hijikata.” 

Souji was the first to respond, grinning from ear to ear as if he were about to reflect upon the impact of the weather on a tournament. 

“Does it matter?” He asked, his tone suggesting the question was rhetorical. “It’s clear what we have to do. Keeping them alive is a liability to the Shinsengumi, so either way they have to go.” 

“Shut the hell up, Souji,” Hijikata rumbled like distant thunder, shifting his weight so that his eyes focused only on Nagakura, hands balled into fists on his lap. “It’s a kid.” 

“A child?” Kondou asked, the concern in his voice cutting more than the edge of any blade could, causing Nagakura to flinch just a bit; it was clear that no one had bothered to tell him this. 

He looked towards Hijikata, eyes begging for it to not be true… But he found no sympathy in his friend’s face, only reticence. That seemed to be enough for him, and he deflated with a sigh, his expression as serious as Mikoto had seen it become in a very long time. 

“It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s a kid,” Hijikata said, violet eyes flashing as they strayed back to Souji, whose smile split the shadows of his face with a crescent of frightening white. “What matters is how much they saw, and what we intend to do about it.”

“When you say kid,” Heisuke asked, his green eyes shining with the same note of worry that made his voice waver slightly, “just how old are you talking?”

In his shadow, Harada sat tight lipped, Heisuke’s emotions reflected in the paleness of his skin. 

Hijikata shifted, dropping some of his stiff and formal posture to humor Heisuke with a brief show of sympathy, “younger than you.” He sighed the words, their heaviness impossible to escape, “though not by much.” 

Heisuke said nothing in response, his silence speaking more than he ever could, though Mikoto had no doubt he would do whatever Hijikata and Kondou asked of him. 

“Doesn’t matter if it’s a kid,” Nagakura asserted, pointedly looking towards Gen, as if he could will away any hesitance amongst their ranks with a glance. “Souji’s right. There’s no way we can let this get out, not when this is a mission from the Shogunate.” 

Mikoto took a breath to fill the sudden silence, Sanan and Saito both saying nothing of what they might be thinking behind their otherwise unreadable expressions. 

Biting down on her lip, Mikoto straightened her spine and took the initiative, reminding herself that Hijikata had brought her here to include her in this discussion. If she looked at it that way, she had a duty to speak her mind or she may end up living with the consequences of a decision she’d had no part in making. 

“I won’t be comfortable with any outcome until we speak to the witness directly,” Mikoto said, her voice abruptly ending the silence and drawing every pair of eyes in the room to her. “I don’t think there’s a way we can know the full extent of what was seen unless we address the problem at its source.” 

“I agree,” Saito said without an ounce of hesitation, his agreement seemingly enough for Sanan, who nodded once in Gen’s direction. 

“If you would go fetch our witness, please, Inoue,” Sanan said in that ever unruffled tone. “I believe our young witness will be put most at ease by your presence. It’s best that we act with prudence in this situation, as Hamamura suggested.” 

Relieved to leave the room behind for just a moment, Genzaburo stood and exited with little fanfare, leaving all of them in tense silence. 

It felt keenly different from how it had just about a year ago, when she herself had first sat in front of them for judgement. Back then there had been a warmth in the circle, a sense of camaraderie and a clear respect for the all the risks she had taken to join up with them as a member of the then Mibu Roshigumi. 

But time changed all things, that sense of prevailing warmth replaced with skepticism and a necessary suspicion born from the burden of command that they now shared between them. A pang of sympathy for the young woman about to enter filled her chest, and she bowed her head so that no one could see her emotions waver on her face. 

“You could have saved us a lot of trouble if you’d dealt with this kid at the scene,” Nagakura said, eyes drilling into Hijikata who met the challenge of his gaze without flinching. 

“The Shinsengumi isn’t in the business of killing civilians,” Mikoto said before she could stop herself, refusing to look up from the dirt that had embedded itself into the tips of her now-roughened hands. 

“Isn’t it a bit different when it comes to the Shogunate’s secrets?” Souji’s voice was relentlessly cheerful, something in his tone beckoning her to finally look up to meet his eyes. “It’s nice to say that it’s our job to protect people, but we have other jobs, too. Do you really think one little kid is worth forgetting that?” 

Mikoto set her jaw and narrowed her eyes, glaring back at him without really meaning to, his words setting her off in spite of herself. “A samurai wields his weapon with intention,” she said, “don’t you think it’s reckless to take the life of a child without first weighing every option we have?” 

“You have some pretty nice ideals,” he quipped back, his smile taunting her. “It’s a shame you’re not a samurai.” 

Mikoto’s teeth audibly snapped shut, the room suddenly so quiet that the sound seemed to echo inside of her own head. Tearing her gaze away from him, her eyes somehow found Kondou, whose expression was disapproving as he stared at Souji from underneath the slant of his heavy brow. He seemed almost primed to say something, but Sanan’s hand on his arm stayed him, though the resolve in his amber eyes still lingered. 

No one spoke up for a long moment until Hijikata’s voice sounded like a whip through the silence, even as calm as it was. 

“Hamamura’s right.”

His words were accompanied by a warning flash in his eyes, like a sliver of steel at the very top of a scabbard, “we kill this kid without thinking it over, we lose part of what makes us who we are. I don’t think I have to remind any of you not to pick any petty fights over this shit.”

Hijikata pointedly looked towards Souji, the full weight of the Code of Conduct resting just behind his words. 

“We will not blindly sacrifice an innocent child,” Kondou said with a tone of absolute authority, silencing any retort Souji might have had before it could pass his lips. “We will balance our duties to the Shogunate and to the people, as men in our position have been doing for hundreds of years.” 

He glanced to Mikoto, his warm eyes filled with a gentle sort of understanding that she had only ever known him to possess, “besides, I would think that Hamamura’s unique experiences qualify her as an expert in this situation.” 

Any further conversation was cut off by the sound of the shoji sliding open and Gen’s warm, concerned voice as he entered the room with their bound prisoner behind him -- 

A slip of a person with delicate features and wide, desperate, dark and searching eyes filled with terror, her slender form only emphasized by the folds of the voluminous fabric she was lost in. There was youth in her face that reminded Mikoto of the younger sisters she’d left behind when she’d come to Kyoto. For an instant, she wanted nothing more than to draw that child into her arms and protect her from the stares of the men she now had to face all alone. 

Feeling eyes boring into her, Mikoto looked up only to be caught in Hijikata’s gaze, his expression calm and appraising as it drew her farther in.  _ One way or another, _ he seemed to say,  _ you are a part of this and there is no turning back.  _

In the eyes of the young woman there was no difference between her and the men of the Shinsengumi. 

Like it or not, Mikoto was a wolf. 

And wolves, she thought as she turned her eyes back towards the trembling child, protected their own… 

Even if the cost was grave. 

She had seen it before, that rain drenched night, the night that Hijikata Toshizo had finally become a demon. 

**Author's Note:**

> Is this going to be Reimeiroku without Ibuki? 
> 
> Yes... Yes it will be. 
> 
> Once I get to the actual chapter one. 
> 
> BY THE WAY -- I can't do links here, but if you want to join an awesome server based around historical otome game, hit me up and I can shoot you a link.


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